


the night when the moon is bright, someone cries something ain't right

by thethinkling



Category: Pet Sematary - Stephen King, Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Post-Episode: s02e21 All Hell Breaks Loose, Post-Season/Series 02 AU, Swearing, Temporary Character Death, Zombies, alternative universe, animal death tw, au pet semetary, but if you watch supernatural you'll probably be fine, major character death is canon but also not exactly permanent, mostly rated as mature bc of animal death, sorry - Freeform, the dog does not make it though, this is a pet cemetary crossover you can probably see where its going, you also dont need to know anything about pet semetary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:27:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26612191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thethinkling/pseuds/thethinkling
Summary: "The shoulders are caved in, there’s something, he doesn’t want to think it god help him, but there’s something mauled about it. Like It’s missing pieces. Like it didn’t come back quite complete."End of season 2 au in which there is no demon deal Dean has to resort to something much worse to bring Sam back.
Relationships: Bobby Singer & Dean Winchester, Bobby Singer & Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Bobby Singer & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	the night when the moon is bright, someone cries something ain't right

**Author's Note:**

> tw for animal death (spoilers:the dog does not make it)
> 
> title from the Ramones' Pet Semetary 
> 
> It's autumn, practically halloween, what's better than a Supernatural/Stephen King crossover?

“Was that his name?”

A beat.

“It’s _ your _ name.” He grunts. Judders. Does a little shift to readjust himself. The car only swerves a little. “C’mon Sammy,” it’s desperate in tone. It's the end of a long day and nowhere near the end of a longer drive. A sigh would be too self-indulgent at this point and he’s trying to kick the habit, look where selfishness has gotten him. 

“We’ve still got a couple of hundred miles left till Bobby’s, get some sleep.” It’s not kind in tone. He sounds like he’s talking through gritted teeth. He sounds like he’d rather not be talking to the  _ thing  _ in the passenger seat. Whatever it is now, he doesn’t want to look at it. 

A speeding by streetlight streaks the window gold. The watchful eyes of the passenger seat flash white. Apparently, his advice has gone unheeded. It sits facing forward, like it should have picture perfect posture, not that – _no!_ _Don’t go there._ The shoulders are caved in, there’s something, he doesn’t want to think it god help him, but there’s something mauled about it. Like It’s missing pieces. Like it didn’t come back quite complete. 

Reaching for the radio he blindly stabs at what he thinks is play, letting the last tape in the player blast. It’s Bon Jovi. _ God _ , he hates Bon Jovi. But the thing seems happy. It’s, well he hesitates to call it humming, but certainly making some sort of noise that could be Bon Jovi adjacent. 

It is going to be a long drive. 

\--- 

No matter what people seem to think digging your hundredth grave is no easier than your first. Maybe it goes a little quicker, your technique a little cleaner but it’s still digging through 6ft of earth. Turning up worms and rock and mud. Moving the soil out and up where it’s not meant to be. It’s backbreaking, Dean thinks he’ll be lucky to still have a back by the time he’s 30.

He considers about 2ft down that digging your own brother's grave has got to be a hundred times worse than even your first grave. Unless that is your first grave,  _ sucks to be you, I guess. _ He chuckles slightly, it's dark and a little hysterical. Can you blame the man? He’s alone with his brother’s corpse at one in the morning.

The earth is unwieldy under his shovel. Or maybe it's Sam's. There’s not a lot of difference between the two, just another cheap home depot shovel that’ll last maybe another grave and half if he’s lucky. Not that he really wants to dig up another grave. If the years digging up decaying corpses hasn’t put him off, tonight surely will. He’ll be happy to never see another grave again, thank you very much. But he only has a few hours left and time moves quicker than you’d think. Standing here in the daylight might not be such a great idea. 

The dirt continues to pile up on one side while a small collection of the larger stones builds up on the other. Dean doesn’t understand how he knows it, but there's no way he’s taking one of the rocks from the other graves. That’s some cursed bullshit right there. 

\---

It’s hitting the early hours of dawn and Dean is reaching that level of tired where everything feels grainy. He’s been driving maybe 10 hours straight. His shoulders and back ache. His hands are blistered. He stinks. The only thing keeping him awake is the smell in the car. It’s difficult. It's dirt. Earthy and rich, smells like the dead. Like iron and blood. He wants to believe it’s from the shovel in the back of the car, from the dirt stained tarp or his own mud caked shoes. He’d scraped them off before getting in the car, but he probably wasn’t as effective as he thought. That’s all. Don’t think about the thing in the passenger seat wearing Sammy’s t-shirt, humming along to Bon Jovi,  _ staring _ at him. 

Pink clouds rip across the open sky, blue coming in at the corners of the world. This should feel like home. It’s the open road, the only constant in his life now. But there's a sour note. Everything feels a little off. The birds that normally would have been waking up are silent. It’s unsettling, Dean knows how highway birds should sound. 

The fuel gage is getting low. He knows baby can make it at least another 30 miles or so but his vision is starting to blur. It might be time to stop and crash in a motel. He hadn’t stopped on his way over to Orrington, just sped through the night, the silent company of his brother’s body wrapped up on the back seat. When he fell asleep at the wheel, jerking awake last second before a truck almost hit, Dean had just pulled over on the side of the road and slept there. Catching a whiff of himself a shower wouldn’t be a miss either. At the next town he’ll stop, a few extra hours won’t matter now. Bobby’s gonna be pissed either way. 

\---

  
  


Dean doesn’t know how but he actually manages to sleep. Maybe it’s the adrenaline finally leaving his body after almost 48 hours awake and the soporific effect of hard physical labour. He shouldn’t be able to sleep; his brother is now lying in the ground buried in dirt. He should be tossing and turning in the backseat of the impala. He should be crying or screaming or drinking. Instead the second he lay down he’s out. He sleeps deep and dreams of nothing.

After what feels like minutes, but in reality, has been hours, Dean awakes. He immediately regrets it because everything hurts. He likes to think he’s in pretty good shape, you’ve got to be to chase down monsters and fight ghosts, but god it feels like he pulled every single muscle in his body. He regrets it a second time when he realises what woke him, because it's familiar. 

When every day in your life is a horror movie, you’d think you’d be better with sudden surprises. However, when the weight of your recently dead brother slides into the passenger seat like you hadn’t just buried him a few hours previously, Dean figures you're entitled to a little spook. He thinks he’s going to be sick. Goosebumps erupt across his skin. His hair stands on end. And he hasn’t even looked yet. 

He’s lying across the back bench, boots kicked off under the seat and jacket folded under his head. He considers the tan lining of the impala’s roof. He turns to look out the back window, condensation fogging up the glass. A little teardrop of water runs down the window, bisecting it in two. He sucks in a breath and forces himself to turn. 

It’s awful. 

Looking at the front row of benches he can see a dim silhouette. It's tall and has its back to him. He recognises the outline, the shaggy head of hair and the jacket. It can't be but it is. It shouldn’t have worked, and yet…

A pause. 

“… _ Sammy?” _

__

There’s dirt caught in the thing’s hair. As it slowly turns to face him it falls, lightly dusting the impala like snow. Dean can’t tell if it’s the fear or the thing, but he swears time has slowed down. No living thing would move like that. So slow and precise. Its shoulders stay still while it turns, maybe just a little too far. Like it doesn’t understand the pain from craning your neck too much. 

It’s him though, Sam. Same choppy fringe and baby face. God he was too young to –  _ no. Look, he’s clearly fine. This is all a bad dream and he never went missing and he remembered the pie. You just fell asleep in the car and now you’re going to keep driving to the next town where there’s gonna be some new big bad you can put a bullet in and forget about all this.  _

__

Dean knows he’s kidding himself. It would be nice if he was somewhat less self-aware, he thinks idly. Could trick himself into going along with whatever fantasy his brains concocted. But no, he’s sitting here in the Impala with his not-so-departed baby brother in the front seat, covered in dirt from the grave he’s just climbed out of.

\--- 

The woman at the motel doesn’t even look at Dean when he asks for a room with two doubles. It’s more reflex than anything, he’d have been happy to leave the thing in the car, but as soon as he’d pulled into the carpark it had gotten out and followed him to the main desk. It’s weird like that, sometimes it’ll do something so like Sam that he forgets it isn’t him for a second. So used to his second shadow that it seems natural this thing is following him. 

A small potted fern sits on the desk of the clerk. She doesn’t seem the type to have a green thumb, but hey everyone’s gotta have some sort of hobby. While his credit card is checked out he stares at it. It’s sitting in a little terracotta pot just out of the direct sunlight. It's surprisingly cute? He must be a sight right now. Five in the fucking morning, looking like hell and stinking like he’d never had a shower in his life and staring intently at a little potted plant. God, he wants this to be over. To just shower and sink into sleep. 

Eventually the clerk must decide everything’s okay because she hands Dean back Gage Creed’s credit card and his room keys. Two. Because he's sharing.  _ Fuck.  _

Their room looks out onto the parking lot. Dean likes that. Ground floor, quick exit. Sam used-  _ no.  _ Sam  _ always  _ complains that it's less safe statistically, a room on a higher floor less likely to get broken into. Dean wants to know just what halfrate burglar sees a motel room lined with salt and full of shotguns and doesn't decide to just pack it in there and then and retrain to teach kindergarten or something. Then he’d pull the older brother card. So, the ground floor it is. He’s not climbing down a fire escape at three in the goddamn morning again. 

He exits the clerk's office, bag slung low, his silent shadow following a few steps behind. 

“You didn’t ask what time check out is.” Dean jumps. Not so silent after all.

“Wha-”

“You didn’t ask when we have to check out.” its voice is insistent. So whiny like Sam when he's bitching. “You only paid for one night. We don't want him checking on us.” That is if Sam swallowed a handful of gravel.

“Look, let's get this straight. There is no us.” Dean has turned on his heels and is staring the thing down for the first time properly. “I paid for the room; I will leave when I want to.” It's a habit, his hand pointing, jabbing to punctuate each word. “Now you can shut up and stay in the room,” a little pause for the drama, “or sit in the car all night.” He’s standing a whisper away from the thing. “I don’t-” He now realises how close they are. “I don’t..uh..”

He can smell the thing, dirt filling his senses. Doesn’t want to look up at the face. Focuses on the thing’s chest. He can see the blood soaked into the white fabric of its shirt. Little pinpricks where its soaked through. He’s frozen. 

“Okay. I’ll go to the room.” Its speech is still kind of slow, slurred. It’s not Sammy, he’d never give in that quickly, there’d normally be at least another fifteen minutes of back and forth bickering. This acquiesce is unnatural. 

Dean shudders suddenly, awfulness of the last 48 hours finally hitting him. But he’s still at least a hundred miles out from Bobby. Gotta collect himself. Gotta shower, eat, sleep. He will deal with it later. It’s what he always does, push it down and hope by the time he gets ‘round to dealing with it it's gone. He turns away from the thing and towards the motel room.

\--- 

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about the pet sematary _ ,  _ it’s actually stupidly easy to find. In fact, it's marked on the town map. Not anything as helpful as  _ Pet Sematary: bring your beloved pets back from the dead, it is that simple!  _ But any hunter worth their salt would recognise the Potter’s Field for what it is. 

It’s on the outskirts of town. Dean pulls up to the plain field and parks the impala as close to the trees as he can get. They’re pines. They rattle ominously. He considers moving baby away to a safer distance but decides against it in the end. Sam’s heavy, the few metres will make a difference. 

He’s there but he’s not moving. Just sitting in the driver seat, hands gripped tight to the wheel. He breathes out once. Shuts his eyes. No time for cowardice. No time to stop. But a break is okay. He breathes in. It’s ragged, burnt,  _ broken.  _ One more breath out. He opens his eyes. Okay, he’s got some work to do. His hands unclench from the steering wheel and he forces himself to swing the door open. He forces his legs to swing out. He stands. He walks around to the back of the car.

In the trunk are two shovels. He picks one up, leaving the other alone. He closes the trunk.

Now he has to open the back door. Sam’s back there. Lying on his back. Wrapped in a spare blanket from the impala. It's red and black plaid. It clashes horribly with everything around it. He picks up his brother, struggling into a fireman’s hold. The blanket slips a little, but he doesn’t look. He locks the car, clips the keys to his belt and prepares to start his hike.

It’s not obvious but a small path leads between the pines, pulling Dean into the forest. It’s tough going, a weight on his back, a shovel in his hand. His keys jingle from his belt, marking each step. He gets into a rhythm.  _ Thump, clink, thump clink. _ The trees get closer and the path more winding as it goes deeper. He almost loses his footing a few times, branches waiting patiently to trip him up.

About half an hour in he finds the first collection of graves. They’re newish, most only 2 to 5 years old. Small little stones painted with smiley faces or crooked ‘RIPs’. Popsicle stick crosses poke up out the ground like morbid flowers, magic marker scrawled across. Older graves spiral back further along the path, drawing him deeper. Some of these might be 60, 70 years old. Fuck.

There’s a crunch under his foot. Dean looks down at the little wooden marker. 

_ Here lies Smucky the cat. He was obedient.  _

Yeah right. He was a cat. Little bastard. What are you gonna train a cat to do anyway? Maybe he should’ve got a stone made for Sammy.  _ Here lies Samuel Winchester. He was obedient.  _ Ha. Little shit never listened to him, now look where he is. Slung over Dean’s shoulder like a sack of bricks and twice as heavy. 

He steps over the little grave marker and is at last at the end of the kid’s attempt at a cemetery. He wants to meet them, each kid who buried their pets in the earth, who left a marker. How did they leave? How did they get over it? Judging by the ages of some of these the makers are dead now. It’s sad. They buried their best friend and then who was left to bury them? There’s no one left.

The path gets a little more rocky, a little more unkept. It's winding and hard. It’s no swamp but with the sweat pouring off him it might as well be. The dark has fully descended by now. A chill has crept into the air. Because this is just his life now a ground fog springs up, just in case it wasn’t creepy enough. 

He descends slowly into the dark, quickly swallowed up by the gloam.

\--- 

Coming out of the shower Dean feels like a new man. He’s wiped the grime off himself, even dug the mud out from under his fingernails. He smells like generic bar soap, skin dry and raw from its scratch. He’d tried to spend as much time in the shower as possible, counting the cracked tiles, shampooing his hair through twice, singing off key to a few Metallica songs. But, it’s getting upwards of 45 minutes and he has to come out at some point. His clean clothes he left in the duffel on his bed and there’s no way he’s putting back on his stained clothes, that unholy mix of mud and his brother’s blood. 

He’s a tough guy, he’s handled vamps and demons and that one Chupacabra down in Texas. He can handle this. 

He pushes the door out gently, not sure if it’s the thing or himself he doesn’t want to spook. The door perhaps reading the room decides to creak. Dean jumps then mentally slaps himself. C’mon it’s just the reanimated corpse of your little brother in there, not the end of the world. He walks out the bathroom. Breathe in, breathe out. 

It’s sitting there on the bed. If it was Sam he’d be fiddling with his laptop or cleaning his gear or reading whatever shitty paperback they’d picked up that week. He’d be moving, animated, quiet but doing something with his hands. Neither of them can sit still for long. Dean thinks it’s the itch from the open road, Sam says it’s the  _ ADHD.  _ But it’s just sitting there, blinking gently every few seconds. Unnaturally still. 

He doesn’t like it. 

Dean grumbles over to the other bed and snatches up the duffel. He slams back into the bathroom to get dressed, stomping and wrenching the door shut to make up for the silence of the motel room. He dresses efficiently in sweatpants and an old t-shirt. He hums loudly as he brushes his teeth. Anything to block out the silence. 

Again, he has to emerge and finds himself back with the thing. He hadn’t noticed it so much at first, but it also stinks. It's smeared in dirt, staining the bedsheets. A quick prayer to whatever to whatever’s listening up there and he forces himself to address it. 

“C’mon, you need a shower.”

It blinks owlishly at him.

“Uh, you know what a shower is…right?” He’s trying to be gentle, doesn’t want to alarm it. 

It blinks again. A grin slowly works its way across its face. It’s not as creepy as he thinks it should be.

“Oh, I see, you’re just being a dick.” He’s forgotten it’s not Sam in the moment. “You stink dude. Move it.” He points at his brother then back at the bathroom. “Or they’re never gonna give us our deposit back.” 

Dean walks towards him and does a kinda push pull thing to get the big lug moving towards the shower. Sam’s surprisingly compliant, letting himself be dragged. It’s like the first few weeks after the fire in Stanford. When he just sat looking into space for hours on end until Dean pushed food at him or forced him to shower. 

As soon as he’s in the bathroom Dean chucks Sam’s own duffel through and shuts the door on him. A few seconds later he hears the shower start up.

\--- 

Dad never let them have pets. 

Correction. Dad never let them have pets  _ again.  _

__

She was a mutt. Brownish golden, with big dark eyes. Sam swore she was some sort of retriever, but she just looked like a dog to Dean. In a second-long flash of respect for his older brother Sam let Dean name her, even though he had found her. Dean, the awesome brother that he is, called her Batman.

Batman was in that awkward stage of puppy growth where she had shot up in height but didn’t understand how to walk anymore. Her paws were too big for her spindly legs and she was horribly underfed. Sam found her in a dumpster behind that week’s motel, luring her out with the lunchmeat from his sandwich. He tried to keep her a secret from Dean, which lasted for all of two seconds when Dean asked what the smell was after walking into the motel. Surprising no one, living in a dumpster doesn’t make for a good smell. 

The two of them wrestled her into the shower, soaping her up and possibly getting more soaked then she did. As soon as Sam shut the water off Batman bolted out of Dean’s arms and out of the bathroom, trailing water behind her. Looking at each other in horror Sam jumped up grabbing a towel and raced after her, while Dean used the rest to try and soak up the small ocean that had formed on the cracked tile floor. 

In the main room Dean found his brother being outsmarted by a dog. She ran around in circles, tail wagging frantically as he chased her between beds and around the sofa. Suddenly the door swung open making the three of them freeze. Dad was home.

Smart dog that she was, Batman decided this was the perfect time to dry off. She shook. Water splashed onto Sam, a foot behind her, towel held only half-heartedly. Dad in the doorway also got a face full, little rivets of water tracing the lines in his face. Dean, still half in the bathroom, was spared. 

Mercifully they were allowed to keep her somehow, provided that they were solely responsible. Dad was not going to be involved. They could live with that, not like Dean hadn’t essentially raised Sam by himself or anything. A dog would be a breeze. 

Sam spent hours training her from dog books he borrowed from the library. Within a month Batman could sit, roll over and shake. She would follow him around the motel room, tail wagging ecstatically behind her. When Sam was at school Dean also taught her to be quiet and stay. Within three months she was coming on hunts. 

Dad reckoned it would be an advantage; her nose was better at picking out scents than their eyes were at picking up trails. She could follow monsters especially well, something inhuman about their smell. She could also be vicious, once when Sam was getting overwhelmed by a vamp, with him and Dad too far away to help in time, she raced in and just about tore the things head off. On the drive back to the motel Sam slept with Batman curled up in his lap in the backseat, like she wasn’t 70 pounds of pure force who had just taken out a vampire. 

When they weren’t on hunts she slept on the end of Sam’s bed or sat with him in the back of the impala. Dean couldn’t tell who was more attached, the kid or the dog. But, when Dean would skip class, he’d take her for long walks, rambling to her about whatever was bothering him that week that he couldn’t tell his dad or brother. She looked like she understood what he was saying. He didn’t like to admit it, but Batman was growing on him. She became a constant in their life of changing schools, dirty motel rooms and the never-ending highway. 

Of course, that was before the werewolf hunt. 

  
  


She lies before him, blood thick and hot on the ground. It’s on his face too. Thin little splatters. She’s whining, looking frantically around, probably for Sam. He can’t look away from the hole in her side, it was grotesque and wrong. Torn out by werewolf teeth. He shuddered not wanting to touch her in case it was contagious. The claw marks from the beast are vicious and deep, gorged right into her. 

Suddenly all the training Dad’s put them through kicks in. He strips off his jacket and flannel. The flannel he presses to her side, trying to stop some of the oozing blood while he wraps her up in the jacket, cradled, like a baby. She whines more. Eyes wide. Head swaying in pain and confusion. She doesn’'t understand why Dean is touching her. Making her hurt more. 

When he stumbles back to Dad and Sammy he’s crying. Tears steak the blood and dirt ground into his face. She isn’t moving much anymore. He collapses at Dad’s feet, Batman cradled in his arms. He sinks slow, like he's collapsing in on himself. Sam rushes up to him, pulling at her trying to see what's wrong. 

“Get back Sammy” he's choking back tears he doesn't want to see but he can't let his little brother either, “Dad, keep him back!”

Batman’s convulsing in his arms now. She makes a deep guttural noise from the back of her throat and Dean doesn’t know how to stop it. Sam’s screaming, she’s crying and Dean is weeping openly. Eventually Dad must understand what's happening and he orders Sam away, pulling him away when he doesn't listen. Dean is left alone with Batman still in his lap. He lays her gently on the pine needle littered floor, movements slow, so he can have his hands free. 

The bleeding won’t stop, it's dying his skin red, hands grotesque. The flannel is soaked through and does nothing. He doesn’t know how much time passes as he watches her convulse on the ground. He can’t save her. 

It's a numbing thought. 

He can’t let her suffer. He loves her. 

Loves her messy fur and the wet dog smell she leaves in the backseat. Loves how she always protects Sammy and how she listens to Dean’s own problems. How she’s fast and strong and loves to chase her own tail best. 

  
  


He stands.

  
  


He thinks about her gentle woof of greeting whenever he returns to the motel. 

  
  


He reaches to his belt.

  
  


He thinks about playing fetch in the park with her and Sam.

  
  


He unclips his gun. Clicks the safety off. 

  
  


He thinks about how gentle she is, even when she could take down a whole vampire.

  
  


He aims. Tears blinding him. Snot pouring across his face. 

  
  


He thinks about what he’s going to tell Sam.

  
  
  


He shoots. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> chapter title from Na Na Na by MCR, it seemed funny at the time


End file.
